Lying

[Sophie86]

Finding out my husband wants to be a woman and has been living like one when I am not at home, I am expected to be supportive and understanding.

Let me be the exception then: It's your life. If a crossdressing husband isn't something you want in your life, you should leave. You can be a lot more supportive and understanding from a distance than you can when you're sitting there thinking, "This is not what I wanted in my life."

I understand the majority of CDs are not TG, but it does happen and for most wives our knowledge is limited and we have had no education on this topic because we didn't know we needed to. I could have understood my spouse being gay easier than I could the CD and TG.

I'm sorry you had to go through that.

In response to why the SO has to beat up on the new person who says I just told my wife and she didn't take it well is because they don't seem to understand the first answer is going to be in most cases your wife is angry, hurt, confused, and lost because you lied to her about a fundamental part of you who are and she has no idea what it means and is now re-evaluating her whole life with you.

I believe that the part I've underlined there is the key worry, and it's a legitimate worry. As you noted, a certain percentage of CDs eventually decide that they are really TS, and they don't always know immediately and won't always admit it if they suspect. How is the wife to know what's going to happen? She doesn't. It would be much easier for her to say, "Well, you lied, and I can't live with a liar, so goodbye," than to stick around and try to deal with being married to someone who is TG. That's why I say it is not the lying itself that is the issue. Marriage is a process of getting to know another person, and couples deal with new revelations all the time. It's the content of this revelation that is the real issue.

The original poster talks about someone being in la la land.

I know I didn't use the words "la la land," so I guess that's you interpretation of something else I said. I'm not sure what I said that could have been taken that way. Could you point me to it?

the poster wants to live in denial and tell others how wrong they are to feel the way they do and wants them to accept that.

No, I never said that SOs are wrong to feel the way they do. I've said two things: 1) I don't think the lying is the real issue for SOs; and 2) people come here for support, and we shouldn't beat them up over having lied to their spouses. Our goal should be to help them move forward.

Strictly speaking it's deception and not a lie simply because we never thought to ask you, "Oh by the way, are you a cross-dresser?"

As the OP, let me say again that I am not in the "it's not lying" camp. Calling it "deception" doesn't help as you point out, and I'm sure that most crossdressers do end up lying at some point in order to cover their activity. I know there were at least a couple of times when I had to tell a bald faced lie or be busted.

It doesn't matter what you want to call it, the bottom line is we have built a life with someone we thought we knew, that now we discover they have been hiding something major about themselves from us, and (right or wrong) it's a matter that affects our lives, how we see ourselves and our relationship, and what we had expected of our future together.

I think the above paragraph makes the point very well that the emphasis in the reaction isn't "Oh my god, you lied!" It's "Oh my god, what does this mean, and what's going to happen now?" If the SO gets stuck on "you lied," I think it's a signal that she's not wanting to confront the latter issues. What she's doing, imo, is mourning the years she "wasted" with someone she knows in her heart she can't live with anymore. The relationship is dead in her heart, but she hasn't quite accepted it yet. She's in the second stage of grief: Anger. Eventually, she will reach the point of acceptance, and it will be over. In the meantime, there's going to be anger, there's going to be bargaining, and there's going to be depression.

For crossdressers, I think it's important to take a clear-eyed view of how your SO is reacting, and what the likely outcome is going to be. If she says something like, "Okay, you shouldn't have lied, but let's work through this," then you have a really good chance of staying together. If she keeps going on about how you lied and betrayed her, then it's probably not going to end well. Be prepared. You don't have to accept whatever moral condemnation she wants to heap on you, but don't try to shift the blame to her either.

For SOs, I think it's important to understand that there is no moral obligation to stay with a husband who crossdresses. Good manners dictates that people shouldn't point and laugh at crossdressers when they see them in public. Morality demands that crossdressers have the right to dress and go out in public without being harrassed or harmed in any way. But there is no moral commandment saying that an SO has to find her crossdressing husband romantically attractive. So don't beat yourself up saying that you "ought" to be able to accept him as he is. There's no point in trying to rationalize your feelings: You feel what you feel, and if you don't feel it, you don't feel it. It's pointless for the two of you to go through however many years of torture while you try to make yourself feel something you can't.

Both should try to have some sympathy and understanding for what the other is going through, if for no other reason than it takes the edge off of your anger and makes you feel a whole lot better about life. It also makes the divorce process a whole lot smoother.